muckefuck | WotD: co-mother-in-law

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WotD: co-mother-in-law

die Gegenschwiegermutter
[n.a.]
la consuegra
la consogra
[n.a.]
[n.a.]
[n.a.]
współteściowa, współświekra
안사돈 (안査頓)
親家母 qīnjiāmǔ

Notes:8. Son's mother-in-law and daughter's mother-in-law, respectively. 9. May mean daughter's mother-in-law only; further investigation needed.

Credit

lhn with this one. He was tickled to find that both Hindi and Hebrew shared a term for this. In case the English is unfamiliar to you (as it was to me), this entry is about how you would refer to the mother of the spouse of one of your children. I guess no one is surprised to find terms for this in the East Asian languages, whose kinship terminology is the stuff of legend, but it's interesting to see what European languages follow suit. I, for one, would not have guessed that such a term existed in German. (And lest you think it's just some academic construction, Googling turned up a Swabian dialect equivalent, Gegenschwiger.)

I'm less surprised by the Polish after having turned up a fearsome list of kinship terms during my brief study of the language. So far no joy elsewhere in northern Europe; in particular, the Celtic languages have always struck me as having a surprisingly impoverished vocabulary for this sort of thing despite retaining a predominately rural and family-based economy for so long. Even their terms for an ordinary mother-in-law (máthair chéile "mother [of a] spouse"; mam-yng-nghyfraith, an English calque) are recent and analytic.

(If you know of any other words, feel free to contribute them. The lack of a conventional English term makes it very difficult to use ordinary dictionaries to find them.)

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I'm curious what the Hebrew term is; I'm having a hard time finding anything that has this meaning in any of my dictionaries.

machotin/machatonista/machatonim; transliteration not guaranteed; I've also seen machatainisteh and machatunim.

(I'm also vague on whether it's Hebrew or Yiddish.)

I was going to say mechetunim, and my parents say it in the way they say Yiddish things, but they might be being cutesy. I can verify if you'd like.

(and of course that's plural, parents of your kid-in-law; I have no idea how to singularize it, which also points towards Yiddish)

Well -im and -ot are standard Hebrew plural endings, and indeed there's an explanation of how these terms are used in Hebrew here.

They may have thrived in Yiddish, but these terms are apparently in parshas in Hebrew, so ... yeah, definitely Hebrew, though Yiddish forms probably exist.

Edited 2009-10-09 00:17 (UTC)

-im and -ot may be standard Hebrew plural endings, but they often change the root, and when I can't figure out how I would change it back, it's often a sign (to me) that the word is an import. But not always, my Hebrew is native but beyond rusty.

The words in the linked article (choten and chotenet, cham and chamot) aren't the ones we're discussing here, and in the article, it only points to the word mechatnim מחתנים as a verb meaning "marry off". "When the Smiths marry off their daughter."

Here are some more: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/co-father-in-law

im and -ot may be standard Hebrew plural endings, but they often change the root, and when I can't figure out how I would change it back, it's often a sign (to me) that the word is an import.

Heheh, see to me it's the REVERSE -- I can't think of a single word of foreign origin that has glaringly obvious changes, whereas in native Hebrew that happens all the time, particularly in the construct form.

Yeah, I screwed up here (I meant to paste another article in -- oops), but still it's obvious that it's the same root as "marry off", (mim-)xet-tav-nun.

I have no idea how to singularize it

machotin(m), machatonista(f), though my parents' pronunciation sounds more like "machatenister" (f), "machatenim" (pl) to me. (I think I've only heard the masculine singular once, when I asked about the terms while

prilicla and I were engaged.)

Machatonista! So Yiddish.

Tagalog: balae ... it's gender neutral, so it refers to co-fathers-in-law too.

Other Philippine languages have this wors too. Abalayan, for example, is what is said in Ilokano.

In case the English is unfamiliar to you (as it was to me)

The German is equally unfamiliar to me -- with the caveat that I think I had seen it before, as the translation of the Greek word συμπεθέρα in my de/el Langenscheidt dictionary.

It's certainly an interesting word.

I haven't seen the German word before. I think you would have to explain to most people what it means.

Father-in-law, חוֹתֵן (chotên), has been Biblical (Exodus 3:1). In standard Hebrew there is no participle piël מְחַתֵּן (mechattén), but there is the passive voice, מְחֻתָּן (mechuttán), the parent of one's son/daughter-in-law. I think that's what you were after, right?

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